World Moms Blog

I am a woman and I am writing from India. So, what is special about that, you may ask.

Save the girl child of India

The United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs (UN-DESA), has now officially declared that India is the most dangerous place for a girl child to be.

India is the country that gave the world the second woman prime minister (Indira Gandhi in 1966). India has sent its women to space; its women have marked their places in sports, the corporate world, Hollywood and just about everywhere else, too.

But I will not bore you with statistics and data that you can check out on your own here, here and here. The point of my post is to bring to light the reasons behind this statement. First, there are some sociocultural pieces I would like to highlight. 

1. In India, a girl is ‘married off’ and sent away to live with her husband and in-laws. It is called the joint-family system (couple, children, husband’s parents, sometimes even the husband’s brother’s family in some cases) opposed to the nuclear family system Read more…

This week, we kick off in New York. Allison Charleston writes on Monday about the value of giving back to the community – something that can be so hard to do while juggling children. Now, this mom is ready to start volunteering again.

On Tuesday, we’re off to Canada, where Multitasking Mumma talks about one of the more expensive aspects of raising children: daycare expenses. Finding someone who you trust to take care of your child can be hard, even more so when you get the bill!

On Tuesday evening, we will have a Human Rights post from Third Eye Mom, who learned about the plight of women in Guatemala on International Womens Day.

We stay in Canada on Wednesday, to hear from Kirsten Doyle. Kirsten tells us about her experiences growing up as an adopted child, and what it was like to meet her birth parents as an adult.
Read more…

Tonight I was watching a movie ‘Mother and Child’ and some of the scenes in the movie suddenly brought home to me how much it paralleled my own thoughts. And I got down to penning this post.

Nearly two-and-a-half years ago, I was ecstatic about being pregnant. Every time I heard that a friend had a baby or that another one was pregnant, I was left wondering: “When will it be my turn?” or, as we say in India: “Mera number kab aayega?*”  Thus it was with great elation that I received news of my own pregnancy.

I was all set for the long nine months and soon realised that a pregnancy was not the cake-walk that it was made out to be in Indian movies, where the heroine was assumed to be pregnant as soon as she started vomiting after marriage, and then there was a song sequence in which the family (especially the husband) Read more…

Martin Luther King spoke about the ghosts of racism. Here, in India, racism exists too – but a different kind of racism. It is called the caste system.

Peaceful demonstrations against the reservation system. New Delhi, India.

If you do not have a prior knowledge of the caste system, briefly it is like this – there is the concept of  a higher (or forward or upper) caste of people comprising of Brahmins and such. The lower (or backward) caste comprises of Dalits and such. The lower castes were economically, educationally and socially underprivileged. And so the Indian government created laws, sixty years ago, which alloted a percentage of college seats and jobs for them so that their standard of living could improve. With that background, now you may read on…

Any Indian, who has been a victim of the caste system, could  write volumes about it, but I will restrict myself to giving you just one link here  for now to understand this better. It is called Reservation system based on caste. Someone unfamiliar with the caste system would be appalled reading just the first few lines of this wiki entry. But this general wiki link is the most muted version of the actual reality.

Reservations in educational institutions and government jobs for the so-called “underprivileged” do not happen the way they were intended to some sixty years ago, before Indian Independence. Uplifting the social and educational status of people should be the goal of such reservation systems, and it should be based on their financial and economic background rather than on the caste system.

Imagine, there is a law, which actually allows my own classmate–whose father could be my father’s colleague–to get admission into an engineering institution Read more…

The thermocol apple tree with thermocol apples and thermocol branches pinned up

As Kirsten wrote in her travel itinerary last Sunday, I do have a tale to tell you, rather my son does.

It is the story of the boy and the apple tree. It’s a very popular story in India and was recently read by my son’s teacher during one of the Parent Teacher meetings.

Let me get on to the beginning of the story. I was called to school one day and informed that my son was selected to represent the school for a story telling competition. Read more…

Two months back, I went home to attend the wedding of a cousin. This was my first visit home since I came to the Garden City seven months ago. Also, the first time my one-year old Little One (hereafter referred to as LO) was going to get a taste of his Mom’s place – the heat, the relatives, the food – in no particular order.

Hubby and I had qualms on how LO was going to take the trip. For one thing, we were going to undertake the 530 km journey by car. To minimise any untoward incidents, we had already decided to make it an overnight trip, so that LO would be asleep for most of the journey.

The last time we made such a trip, he had fallen prey to a vicious cold and it took him almost a month to get over it. And he was just 7 months old at the time. Now that he was a sturdy 14-month old, we thought we would have things easier this time. Read more…